Finding Hope in a Challenging SeasonНамуна

Remember the “good ol’ days”?

I wonder what memories that question brings to your mind, as a Christian. Do you perhaps think of your teenage years, when your faith had more passion and simplicity than it has today? Or if you were around for them, do you think of the Billy Graham crusades, when people were becoming Christians in their tens of thousands?

At the beginning of Jeremiah 2, God remembers the good ol’ days in his relationship with Israel. He calls to mind their devotion, love and holiness as they followed him through the wilderness to the promised land.

Unfortunately, for the remainder of this chapter, God brings grave charges against his people. They have followed idols. They have defiled his land. They have forsaken God and chosen to depend on themselves. As a result, God says, they have been plundered by their enemies.

How have you responded to the hardships currently being experienced by God’s people? As churches have closed down and other ideologies have taken hold in our societies, where have you looked for hope? Whom have you sought to blame?

The most shocking line in the whole chapter is this: “Yet in spite of all this you say, ‘I am innocent; he is not angry with me.’” Such is the power of denial and the deception of sin! After the laundry list of wrongdoing God brings against his people, he knows they will still find themselves innocent. They will find a way to make it someone else’s fault.

When you look at all the challenges being faced by the Christian church today, there are undoubtedly external forces coming against her (both human and spiritual). I wonder, though, whether we might have the humility to admit that the church itself is guilty of sin too? That we have wandered from our first love, followed idols, and chosen to depend on ourselves, rather than God.

Of course, we can’t change the whole world, or even the whole church, but we can change ourselves. We can all, as GK Chesterton most famously did, answer the question, “What is wrong?”, with, “I am wrong”, and seek God in repentance and faith.